Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. RAXBURN, 1756-1823?LAWRENCE, 1769-1830. SIR HENRY RAEBURN was born at Stockbridge, near Edinburgh, in 1756. He was the son of a manufacturer, and was early left an orphan. He was apprenticed to a goldsmith, but in the course of his apprenticeship, having taught himself to draw, and being quick in seizing a likeness, he tried miniature painting. He was so successful that his master found it more remunerative to employ the lad as a miniature painter than to keep him engaged with his graving tools. At the end of his apprenticeship, the young man abandoned his goldsmith’s trade altogether, and strove to qualify himself for a portrait painter, teaching himself still by copying the portraits of Martin, a Scotch clergyman’s son, at that time a painter of repute in Edinburgh. Raeburn married, happily, a wife who, to her other good qualifications, added the possession of some property. With his wife, the young painter visited London, where his genius and Imperial Biographical Dictionary. industry were cordially acknowledged by Sir Joshua Reynolds, on whose advice Raeburn, with his wife, proceeded to Italy, duly spending there the greater part of the artist term of three years. On Raeburn’s return to Scotland, he found no difficulty in establishing himself in Edinburgh, and was rewarded for his enterprise and constancy by rapidly rising to the same position in the Scotch capital that Sir Joshua Reynolds occupied in London. While Raeburn was president of the Royal Society of Artists in Scotland, he was elected in succession an associate and a member of the English Academy. When George IV. visited Edinburgh, Raeburn was knighted, and appointed portrait painter to the king. Sir Henry Raeburn had a long and honourable career, during which he painted almost every …